In its deepest and most authentic sense, a social ecology is the awakening earth community reflecting on itself, uncovering its history, exploring its present predicament, and contemplating its future. [2] One aspect of this awakening is a process of philosophical reflection. As a philosophical approach, a social ecology investigates the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political dimensions of the relationship between the social and the ecological, and seeks the practical wisdom that results from such reflection. It seeks to give us, as beings situated in the course of real human and natural history, guidance in facing specific challenges and opportunities. In doing so, it develops an analysis that is both holistic and dialectical, and a social practice that might best be described as an eco-communitarianism.

The Social and the Ecological

A social ecology is first of all, an ecology. There are strong communitarian implications in the very term ecology. Literally, it means the logos, the reflection on or study of, the oikos, or household. Ecology thus calls upon us to begin to think of the entire planet as a kind of community of which we are members. It tells us that all of our policies and problems are in a sense “domestic” ones. While a social ecology sometimes loses its bearings as it focuses on specific social concerns, when it is consistent it always situates those concerns within the context of the earth household, whatever else it may study within that community. The dialectical approach of a social ecology requires social ecologists to consider the ecological dimensions of all “social” phenomena. There are no “non-ecological” social phenomena to consider apart from the ecological ones.

In some ways, the term “social” in “social ecology” is the more problematical one. There is a seeming paradox in the use of the term “social” for what is actually a strongly communitarian tradition. Traditionally, the “social” realm has been counterposed to the “communal” one, as in Tönnies’ famous distinction between society and community, Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Yet this apparent self-contradiction may be a path to a deeper truth. A social ecology is a project of reclaiming the communitarian dimensions of the social, and it is therefore appropriate that it seek to recover the communal linguistic heritage of the very term itself. “Social” is derived from “socius,” or “companion.” A “society” is thus a relationship between companions — in a sense, it is itself a household within the earth household.

An Evolving Theory

Over the past quarter-century, a broad social and ecological philosophy has emerged under the name “social ecology.” While this philosophy has recently been most closely associated with the thought of social theorist Murray Bookchin, it continues a long tradition of ecological communitarian thought going back well into the nineteenth century. The lineage of social ecology is often thought to originate in the mutualistic, communitarian ideas of the anarchist geographer Kropotkin (1842–1921). One can certainly not deny that despite Kropotkin’s positivistic tendencies and his problematical conception of nature, he has an important relationship to social ecology. His ideas concerning mutual aid, political and economic decentralization, human-scaled production, communitarian values, and the history of democracy have all made important contributions to the tradition. [3]However, it is rooted much more deeply in the thought of another great anarchist thinker, the French geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). During the latter half of the last century, and into the beginning of the present one, Reclus developed a far-ranging “social geography” that laid the foundations of a social ecology, as it explored the history of the interaction between human society and the natural world, starting with the emergence of homo sapiens and extending to Reclus’ own era of urbanization, technological development, political and economic globalization, and embryonic international cooperation.

Reclus envisioned humanity achieving a free, communitarian society in harmony with the natural world. His extensive historical studies trace the long record of experiments in cooperation, direct democracy and human freedom, from the ancient Greek polis, through Icelandic democracy, medieval free cities and independent Swiss cantons, to modern movements for social transformation and human emancipation. At the same time, he depicts the rise and development of the modern centralized state, concentrated capital and authoritarian ideologies. His sweeping historical account includes an extensive critique of both capitalism and authoritarian socialism from an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian perspective, and an analysis of the destructive ecological effects of modern technology and industry allied with the power of capital and the state. It is notable that a century ago Reclus’ social theory attempted to reconcile a concern for justice in human society with compassionate treatment of other species and respect for the whole of life on earth — a philosophical problematic that has only recently reemerged in ecophilosophy and environmental ethics. [4]

Many of the themes in Reclus’ work were developed further by the Scottish botanist and social thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), who described his work as “biosophy,” the philosophical study of the biosphere. Geddes focuses on the need to create decentralized communities in harmony with surrounding cultural and ecological regions and proposes the development of new technologies (neotechnics) that would foster humane, ecologically-balanced communities. He envisions an organicically developing cooperative society, based on the practice of mutual aid at the most basic social levels and spreading throughout society as these small communities voluntarily federate into larger associations. Geddes orients his work around the concepts of “Place, Work, and Folk,” envisioning a process of incorporating the particularities of the natural region, humane, skillful and creative modes of production, and organically developing local culture into his “Eutopia” or good community. Geddes calls his approach a “sociography,” or synthesis of sociological and geographical studies. He applies this approach in his idea of the detailed regional survey as a means of achieving community planning that is rooted in natural and cultural realities and grows out of them organically. He thus makes an important contribution to developing the empirical and bioregional side of the social ecological tradition. [5]

Many of Geddes’ insights were later integrated into the expansive vision of society, nature, and technology of his student, the American historian and social theorist Lewis Mumford (1895–1992), who is one of the most pivotal figures in the development of the social ecological tradition. Ramachandra Guha is certainly right when he states that “[t]he range and richness of Mumford’s thought mark him as the pioneer American social ecologist …” [6] Most of the fundamental concepts to which Bookchin later attached to the term “social ecology” were borrowed from Mumford’s much earlier ecological regionalism. [7] The philosophical basis for Mumford’s social analysis is what he calls an “organic” view of reality, a holistic and developmental approach he explicitly identifies as an “ecological” one. [8] In accord with this outlook, he sees the evolution of human society as a continuation of a cosmic process of organic growth, emergence, and development. Yet he also sees human history as the scene of a counter-movement within society and nature, a growing process of mechanization.

Much like Reclus before him, Mumford depicts history as a great struggle between freedom and oppression. In Mumford’s interpretation of this drama, we find on one side the forces of mechanization, power, domination, and division, and on the other, the impulse toward organism, creativity, love, and unification. The tragedy of history is the increasing ascendancy of mechanism, and the progressive destruction of our organic ties to nature and to one another. The dominant moment of history, he says, has been “one long retreat from the vitalities and creativities of a self-sustaining environment and a stimulating and balanced communal life.” [9]

Mumford describes the first decisive step in this process as the creation in the ancient world of the Megamachine, in the form of regimented, mechanized massing of human labor-power under hierarchical control to build the pyramids as an expression of despotic power. While the Megamachine in this primal barbaric form has persisted and evolved over history, it reemerges in the modern world in a much more complex, technological manifestation, with vastly increased power, diverse political, economic and cultural expressions, and apparent imperviousness to human control or even comprehension. Mumford sees the results of this historical movement as the emergence of a new totalitarian order founded on technological domination, economic rationality and profit, and fueled by a culture of obsessive consumption. The results are a loss of authentic selfhood, a dissolution of organic community, and a disordered, destructive relationship to the natural world.

Mumford’s vision of the process of reversing these historical tendencies is a social ecological one. He foresees a process of social decentralization in which democratic institutions are recreated at local and regional levels as part of organic but diverse communities. “Real human communities,” he contends, are those that combine unity with diversity and “preserve social as well as visual variety.” [10] Following Geddes and prefiguring bioregionalism, Mumford believes that the local community must be rooted in the natural and cultural realities of the region. “Strong regional centers of culture” are the basis for “an active and securely grounded local life.” [11] Regionalism is not only an ecological concept, but also a political and cultural one, and is the crucial link between the most particular and local dimensions and the most universal and global ones. “The rebuilding of regional cultures” Mumford says, “will give depth and maturity to the world culture that has likewise long been in the process of formation.” [12] Mumford contends that an epochal process of personal and social transformation is necessary if the course of history is to be redirected toward a humane, ecological, life-affirming future. Much in the spirit of communitarian philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), he foresees a humanized, cooperative world culture emerging out of regenerated regional cultures that arise in turn out of a regenerated human spirit. [13]

While he begins with a general perspective on society and nature that is close to Mumford’s, Bookchin makes a number of crucial contributions to the further development of a social ecology. [14] Most significantly, he broadens the theoretical basis of the communitarian, organicist, and regionalist tradition developed by Reclus, Geddes and Mumford by making dialectical analysis a central focus. He thereby opens the way for more critical and theoretically sophisticated discussions of concepts like holism, unity-in-diversity, development, and relatedness. He also develops Mumford’s defense of an organic world view into a more explicitly ecological theoretical perspective. Mumford’s analysis of the historical transformation of organic society into the Megamachine is expanded in Bookchin’s somewhat broader account of the emergence of diverse forms of domination and of the rise of hierarchical society. He devotes more detailed attention to the interaction of the state, economic classes, patriarchy, gerontocracy, and other factors in the evolution of domination. Of particular importance is Bookchin’s emphasis on the central role of the developing global capitalist economy in ecological crisis, which corrects Mumford’s tendency to overemphasize the technical at the expense of the economic. [15] He also adds some additional chapters to the “history of freedom,” especially in his discussions of the mutualistic, liberatory and ecological dimensions of tribal societies, millenarian religious movements and utopian experiments. Finally, while his predecessors presented a rather general vision of a politics that was anti-authoritarian, democratic, decentralist and ecological, Bookchin gives a concrete political direction to the discussion of such a politics in his proposals for libertarian municipalism and confederalism.

Some of these contributions have come at a considerable cost. Although Bookchin develops and expands the tradition of social ecology in important ways, he has at the same time also narrowed it through dogmatic and non-dialectical attempts at philosophical system-building, through an increasingly sectarian politics, and through intemperate and divisive attacks on “competing” ecophilosophies and on diverse expressions of his own tradition. [16] To the extent that social ecology has been identified with Bookchinist sectarianism, its potential as an ecophilosophy has not been widely appreciated.

Fortunately, the fundamental issues posed by a social ecology will not fade away in the smoke of ephemeral (and eminently forgettable) partisan skirmishes. Inevitably, a broad, vibrant, and inherently self-critical tradition like social ecology will resist attempts to restrict it in a manner that contradicts its most fundamental values of holism, unity-in-diversity, organic growth and dialectical self-transcendence. Thus, despite its temporary setbacks, the project of a social ecology continues to develop as a general theoretical orientation, as an approach to the analysis of specific problems, and as a guide to practical efforts at social and ecological regeneration.

A Dialectical Holism

A social ecology, as a holistic vision, seeks to relate all phenomena to the larger direction of evolution and emergence in the universe as a whole. Within this context, it also examines the course of planetary evolution as a movement toward increasing complexity and diversity and the progressive emergence of value. According to Mumford, an examination of the “creative process” of “cosmic evolution” reveals it to be “neither random nor predetermined” and shows that a “basic tendency toward self-organization, unrecognizable until billions of years had passed, increasingly gave direction to the process.” [17]

This outlook is related to the long teleological tradition extending “from ancient Greek thought to the most recent organicist and process philosophies. It is in accord with Hegel’s insight that “substance is subject,” if this is interpreted in an evolutionary sense. There is no complete and “given” form of either subject or substance, but rather a universal process of substance-becoming-subject. Substance tends toward self-organization, life, consciousness, self-consciousness, and, finally, transpersonal consciousness (though the development takes place at all levels of being and not merely in consciousness). Social ecology is thus linked to theories of evolutionary emergence. Such a position remains implicit in Hegel’s dialectical idealism, [18] receives a more explicit expression in Samuel Alexander’s cosmic evolutionism, [19] underlies the metaphysics of Whitehead and contemporary process philosophy, [20] is given a rather technocentric and anti-naturalist turn in Teilhard de Chardin, [21] is synthesized with Eastern traditions in Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo, [22] and finds its most developed expression in Ken Wilber’s recent effort at grand evolutionary synthesis. [23]

A social ecology interprets planetary evolution and the realization of social and ecological possibilities as a holistic process, rather than merely as a mechanism of adaptation. This evolution can only be understood adequately by examining the interaction and mutual determination between species and species, between species and ecosystem, and between species, ecosystem and the earth as a whole, and by studying particular communities and ecosystems as complex, developing wholes. Such an examination reveals that the progressive unfolding of the potentiality for freedom (as self-organization, self-determination, and self-realization) depends on the existence of symbiotic cooperation at all levels — as Kropotkin pointed out almost a century ago. We can therefore see a striking degree of continuity in nature, so that the cooperative ecological society that is the goal of a social ecology is found to be rooted in the most basic levels of being.

Some critics of social ecology have claimed that its emphasis on the place of human beings in the evolutionary process betrays a non-ecological anthropocentrism. While this may be true of some aspects of Bookchin’s thought, it does not describe what is essential to a social ecology. Although we must understand the special place that humanity has within universe and earth history, the consequences of such understanding are far from being hierarchical, dualistic, or anthropocentric. A dialectical analysis rejects all “centrisms,” for all beings are at once centers (of structuration, self-organization, perceiving, feeling, sensing, knowing, etc.) and also expressions of that which exists at a distance, since from a dialectical perspective, determination is negation, the other is immanent in a being, and the whole is immanent in the part. There exists not only unity-in-diversity, and unity-in-difference but also unity-in-distance. We must interpret our place in nature in accord with such an analysis, comprehending the ways in which our being is internally related, we might say “vertically,” to more encompassing realms of being, and, we might say “horizontally,” to wider realms of being. By exploring our many modes of relatedness we discover our social and ecological responsibility — our capacity to respond to the needs of the human and natural communities in which we participate. [24]

The use of metaphors such as community and organism in a dialectical and holistic account of diverse phenomena is certainly not unproblematical. There has rightly been much debate in ecophilosophy concerning the status of such images, and their function and limitations must be a subject of continuing reflection. [25] A dialectical approach assumes their provisional nature, the importance of avoiding their use in a rigid, objectifying way, and the necessity of allowing all theoretical concepts to develop in the course of inquiry. Thus, there are certainly senses in which the earth or the biosphere cannot be described as a community. One might define community as a relationship existing between beings who can act reciprocally in certain ways, taking the criterion for reciprocity to be showing respect, carrying out obligations, or some other capacity. If one adopts such a “model” of a community, the earth is certainly not one, any more than it is an organic whole, if that term is taken to mean having the qualities of a biological organism. Yet the term “community” has in fact much more expansive connotations than those just mentioned. A community is sometimes thought to include not only competent adult human beings (moral agents), but infants and children, the mentally incompetent, past generations, future generations, domesticated animals, artifacts, architecture, public works, values and ideals, principles, goals, symbols, imaginary significations, language, history, customs and traditions, territory, biota, ecosystems and other constituents that are thought essential to its peculiar identity. To be a member of a community is often thought to imply responsibilities of many kinds in relation to some or all of the categories listed.

Questions are also raised about the totalizing implications of holism. Critics of holism sometimes identify it with an extreme organicism that denies the significance, reality, or the value of the parts. [26] It is important therefore to understand that “holism” does not refer exclusively to a view in which the whole is ontologically prior to the part, more metaphysically real than the part, or deserving of more moral consideration than the part. In fact, a dialectical holism rejects the idea that the being, reality or value of the parts can be distinguished from that of the whole in the manner presupposed by such a critique.

This is sometimes misunderstood when critics overlook an important distinction within a dialectical holism. In its comprehensively holistic analysis, the parts of a whole are not mere parts but rather holons, which are themselves relative wholes in relation to their own parts. [27] The good of the part can therefore not be reduced to a function of its contribution to the good of the whole. Its good can be also be considered in relation to its participation in the attainment of the good of a whole which it helps constitute. But beyond this, to mention what is most relevant to the critiques of holism, its attainment of its own good as a unique expression of wholeness must also be considered. There is a striking irony here. An authentic holism is capable of appreciating the value of kinds of wholeness (realized form, self-organization, attainment of good) that are often ignored by “individualisms” that defend one level of wholeness against its possible dissolution in some larger whole. Holism does not mean the fetishization of some particular kind of whole, which would constitute a version of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, but rather an exploration of the meaning of many kinds of wholeness that appear in many ways and on many levels within developing unity-in-diversity.

No Nature

So much for the truth of the whole. However, a dialectical holism refuses to objectify, reify or absolutize any whole, including the whole of nature. Just as our experience of objects or things points to the reality of that which escapes objectification and reification, our experience of the whole of nature points to the reality of that which which cannot be reduced to nature.[28]

Since the beginnings of philosophical reflection, dialectical thinkers of both East and West have proposed that beneath all knowing and objects of knowledge there is a primordial continuum, the eternal one-becoming-many, the ground of being. It is what Lao Tzu described in the Tao Te Ching as the reality that precedes all conceptualization, or “naming,” and all determination, or “carving of the block”:

“The Tao (Way) that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth …” [29]

This reality is ontologically prior to ecological differentiation, and indeed, to “nature” itself — which is one reason that a mere “naturalism” can never be adequately dialectical. It is an apprehension of the conditional reality of all phenomena that drives dialectical thought to an affirmation of both the being and non-being of all objects, categories, and concepts. This ground is what social ecological theorist Joel Kovel refers to as the “plasma of being.” It is also what mystical philosophers like Böhme have, quite dialectically, called “the groundless Ground,” attempting to express the idea that it is a non-objectifiable grounding of being, rather than an objectified ground, or substance, on which anything can be thought to stand, or which “underlies” other realities. If we wish to attach any concept to this ultimate, it should perhaps be (following Whitehead) “creativity.”

Kovel points out, contemporary science has shown that such a continuum underlies the diversity of beings.

“In the universe as a whole, there is no real separation between things; there are only, so far as the most advanced science can tell us, plasmatic quantum fields; one single, endlessly perturbed, endlessly becoming body.” [30]

Kovel’s account of the our relation to this primordial ground is both phenomenological and psychoanalytic. It reveals the ways in which we are ecological beings, and indeed spiritual beings, because our being extends beyond the limits of the ego or socially constructed selfhood. Much of our experience reveals to us that this self is not sufficient, or primary,

“but is rather that ensemble of social relations which precipitates out of a primordium which comes before social causation — a core which, crucially, remains active throughout life. Before the self, there is being; and before being is the unconscious primordium. Society intersects with the individual through a set of cultural representations. It is a naming, a designation, an affixing from without. Without this naming, the stuff of a person would never take form. But the unconscious, in its core, is prerepresentational.” [31]

Thus, there are fundamental aspects of being that connect us, physically, psychologically and ontologically, with greater (or deeper) realities — with other living beings, with our species, with the earth, with the primordial ground of being.

This idea of connectedness leads us to the question of the place of the concept of spirit in a dialectical holism. The most radical “critical” and dialectical views after Hegel, beginning with the Young Hegelians — Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx and their peers — were intent on banishing Hegel’s central category from the philosophical realm. The post-Hegelian dialectical tradition has been dominated by a reductive materialism that has dogmatically rejected the possibility of dialectical inquiry into the most fundamental ontological questions. Some versions of social ecology have inherited this anti-spiritual tendency of Western materialism. Thus, while Bookchin has sometimes invoked the concept of “ecological spirituality” in his writings, it has usually been in the weak sense of a vague ecological or even ethical sensibility and he has increasingly sought to banish any strong conception of “spirit” from his social ecological orthodoxy.

It is becoming evident, however, that the most radically dialectical and holistic thinking restores the ontological and political significance of the concept of spirit. Without implying any of the dogmatic and one-sided idealist aspects of Hegel’s conception of spirit, a social ecology can find in the concept an important means of expressing our relationship to the evolving, developing, unfolding whole and its deeper ontological matrix. Kovel begins his discussion of spirit with the statement that it concerns “what happens to us as the boundaries of the self give way.” [32] The negation of ego identity that he intends by this concept takes place when we discover our relationship to the primordial continuum and to its expressions in the processes of life, growth, development, and the striving toward wholeness. A social ecology can give meaning to an ecological spirituality that will embody the truth of the religious consciousness, [33] which is a liberatory truth, however mystified and distorted it may have been for purposes of domination and social conformism. Such a spirituality is the synthesis and realization of the religion of nature and the religion of history. It consists of a response to the sacredness of the phenomena, of the multiplicity of creative expressions of being, and of the whole that encompasses all beings. It is also an expression of wonder and awe at the mystery of becoming, the unfolding of the universe’s potentiality for realized being, goodness, truth and beauty.

The Ecological Self

A social ecology applies its holistic and dialectical approach of the question of the nature of the self. While it emphasizes wholeness, it does not accept the illusory and indeed repressive ideal of a completely harmonious, fully-integrated selfhood. Rather it sees the self as a developing whole, a relative unity-in-diversity, a whole in constant process of self-transformation and self-transcendence. The very multiplicity of the self, “the chaos within one,” is highly valued, since it attests to the expansiveness of selfhood and to our continuity with the larger context of being, of life, of consciousness, of mind. Such a view of selfhood shows a respect for the uniqueness of each person, and for the striving of each toward a highly particularized (in some ways incomparable) good that flows from his or her own nature. But it also recognizes that personal self-realization is incomprehensible apart from one’s dialectical interaction with other persons, with the community, and with the larger natural world. The development of authentic selfhood means the simultaneous unfolding of both individuality and social being. The replacement of the voracious yet fragile and underdeveloped ego of consumer society with such a richly-developed selfhood is one of the preeminent goals of social ecology.

Within this general orientation, there remain many areas for development of the social-ecological conception of the self. As Kovel points out, the realm of signification creates an imaginary sphere in which there is a necessary degree of separation from nature, and even from oneself as nature. He explains that

“we are at one time part of nature, fully participating in natural processes; and at the same time we are radically different from nature, ontologically destined by a dialectic between attachment and separation to define ourselves in a signified field which by its very ‘nature’ negates nature.” [34]

Because of this “basic negativity” in the human standpoint toward the world,

“the relationship between the self and nature cannot be comprehended though any simple extrapolation of an ecological model grounded in unity in diversity.” [35]

Moreover, the “thinglike” aspects of the self — the realm of the preconceptual and of the most primordial layers of desire — can never be fully transcended in either thought or experience. Part of the social ecological project of comprehending “unity-in-diversity” is to theorize adequately this duality and the necessary experiential and ontological moments of alienation, separation, and distance within a general non-dualistic, holistic framework (rather than merely to explain these moments away).

In doing so, social ecology will delve more deeply into those inseparable dimensions of body and mind that dualism has so fatefully divided. As we explore such realities as thought, idea, image, sign, symbol, signifier, language, on the one hand, and feeling, emotion, disposition, instinct, passion, and desire on the other, the interconnection between the two “realms” will become increasingly apparent. The abstract “naturalism” of Bookchin’s social ecology will be transformed into a richer, more dialectical, and many-sided naturalization. As Abram notes,

“[w]e can experience things — can touch, hear, and taste things — only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive! We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us.” [36]

Such a holistic concept of human-nature interaction is a necessary complement to the conception of humanity as “nature becoming self-conscious” or “nature knowing itself,” which might otherwise be taken in a one-sidedly intellectual, objectifying, and ultimately idealist sense.

A Social Ecology of Value

For a social ecology, our ecological responsibility as members of the earth community arises from both our relationship to the interrelated web of life on earth and also from our place as a unique form of nature’s and the earth’s self-expression. As we accept the responsibilities implied by our role in “nature becoming self-conscious,” we can begin to reverse our presently anti-evolutionary and ecocidal direction, and begin to contribute to the continuation of planetary natural and social evolution. We can also cooperate with natural evolution through our own self-development. The overriding ethical challenge to humanity is to determine how we can follow our own path of self-realization as a human community while at the same time allowing the entire earth community to continue its processes of self-manifestation and evolutionary unfolding. [37] A crucial link between these two goals is the understanding of how the flourishing of life on earth is constitutive of the human good, as we dialectically develop in relation to the planetary whole. As Thomas Berry has noted, a central aspect of the human good is to enjoy and indeed celebrate the goodness of the universe, a goodness that is most meaningfully manifested for us in the beauty, richness, diversity and complexity of life on earth (the social and ecological unity-in-diversity).

A dialectical and holistic theory of value attempts to transcend atomistic theories, without dissolving particular beings (including human beings) into the whole, whether the whole of nature or of the biosphere. Holmes Rolston’s holistic analysis, and especially his critique of the conventional division of value into intrinsic and instrumental varieties, can contribute much to the development of a social ecology of value. When value is generated in a system (or, as a social ecology would state it, within a whole that is not reducible to a mere sum of parts), we find that it is not generated in an “instrumental” form, for there is no specific entity or entities for the good of which the value is generated as a means. Nor do we find “intrinsic” value in the sense that it there is a single coherent, definable good or telos for the system. Therefore, we must posit something like what Rolston calls “systemic value.” According to this conception, the value that exists within the system “is not just the sum of the part-values. No part values increase of kinds, but the system promotes such increase. Systemic value is the productive process; its products are intrinsic values woven into instrumental relationships.” [38]

Such a holistic analysis helps us to reach an authentically ecological understanding of value within ecosystems or eco-communities. For Rolston, the “species-environment complex ought to be preserved because it is the generative context of value.” [39] The ecosystem — that is, the eco-community which has shaped the species, is internally related to it, and is embodied in its very mode of being — is a value-generating whole. Ultimately, the earth must be comprehended as, for us, the most morally-significant value-generating whole. We must fully grasp the conception of a planetary good realizing itself through the greatest mutual attainment of good by all the beings that constitute that whole — in terms of both their own goods and their contribution to shared systemic goods of the various wholes in which they participate.

An Ecology of the Imagination

If a social ecology is to contribute to radical ecological social transformation, it must address theoretically all the significant institutional dimensions of society. It must take into account the fact that every social institution contains organizational, ideological, and imaginary aspects (moments that can only be separated from one another for purposes of theoretical analysis). An economic institution, for example, includes a mode of organizing persons and groups, their activities and practices, and of utilizing material means for economic ends. It also includes a mode of discourse, and a system of ideas by which it understands itself and seeks to legitimate its ends and activities. Finally, it includes a mode of self-representation and self-expression by which it symbolizes itself and imagines itself. The social imaginary is part of this third sphere, and consists of the system of socially-shared images by which the society represents itself to itself.

One essential task of a social ecology is to contribute to the creation of an ecological imaginary, an endeavor that presupposes an awareness of our own standpoint within the dialectical movement of the social world. A social ecology of the imagination therefore undertakes the most concrete and experiential investigation of the existing imaginary. To the extent that this has been done, it has been found that we live in an epoch that is defined above all by the dominant economistic institutions. This dominance is exercised through all the major institutional spheres: economistic forms of social organization, economistic ideology, and an economistic imaginary. But the dominant economism is far from simple and monolithic. Most significantly, it is divided into two essential moments which interact in complex and socially efficacious ways.

These two essential moments, productionism and consumptionism, are inseparable and mutually interdependent. As Marx pointed out long ago in the classical dialectical inquiry on this subject, “production, distribution, exchange and consumption … all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.” [40] While Marx’s analysis was profoundly shaped by the productionist era in which he lived, all subsequent inquiry is a continuation of the dialectical project that he suggests in this passage. A social ecology ignores none of the moments Marx identifies, but rather looks at distribution and exchange as mediating terms between production and consumption.

But it will focus on the contemporary world as the scene of a strange dialectic between abstract, systemic rationality and social and ecological irrationality. The economistic society drives relentlessly toward absolute rationality in the exploitation of natural and human resources, in the pursuit of efficiency of production, in the development of technics, in the control of markets through research, and in the manipulation of behavior through marketing. At the same time, it rushes toward complete irrationality in the generation of infinite desire, in the colonization of the psyche with commodified images, in the transformation of the human and natural world into a system of objects of consumption, and most ultimately and materially, in undermining the ecological basis for its own existence. Whatever the shortcomings of Marx as economist and political theorist, he is unsurpassed as a prophet insofar as he revealed that the fundamental irrationality of economistic society is in its spirituality — the fetishism of commodities.

An Ecological Imaginary

One result of the careful study of the social imaginary is the realization that a decisive moment in social transformation is the development of a counter-imaginary. Success in the quest for an ecological society will depend in part on the generation of a powerful ecological imaginary to challenge the dominant economistic one. While this process is perhaps in an embryonic stage, we have in fact already developed certain important elements of an emerging ecological imaginary.

The image of the region poses a powerful challenge to the economistic, statist and technological imaginaries. Regions are a powerful presence, yet have no clearly definable boundaries. This is the case whether these regions be ecoregions, georegions, bioregions, ethnoregions, mythoregions, psychoregions, or any other kind. Regionalism evokes a dialectical imagination that grasps the mutual determination between diverse realms of being, between culture and nature, unity and multiplicity, between form and formlessness, between being and nothingness. The concept of regionality implies an interplay between the overlapping, evolving boundaries of natural spaces and the flowing, redefining boundaries of imaginary spaces. [41]

The region is intimately connected to another powerful ecological image — that of the wild. The wild is present in the spontaneous aspects of culture and nature. We find it in forms of wild culture, wild nature, and wild mind: in the poetic, in the carnavalesque, in dreams, in the unconscious, in wilderness. We find it in the living earth, and in the processes of growth and unfolding on the personal, communal, planetary and cosmic levels. The point is not to find the wild in any “pristine” state; it is always intermixed with civilization, domestication, and even domination. The discovery of the wild within a being or any realm of being means the uncovering of its self-manifestation, its creative aspects, its relative autonomy. It is the basis for respect for beings, but even more, for wonder, awe, and a sense of the sacred in all things. The revolts and individualisms of the dominant culture appear quite tame when civilization is subjected to the critique of the wild. [42]

The image of the earth as “Home,” or planetary household, and humans as members of the earth community has great imaginary power. As we develop greater knowledge of ecological complexity, and as we rediscover the marvelous richness of place, the earth image begins to incorporate within itself a rich regional and local specificity, and become a holistic representation of planetary unity-in-diversity. As the horror of economistic-technocratic globalism becomes increasingly apparent, and as the world is remade in the image of the factory, the prison and the shopping mall, the rich, dialectical counter-image of the earth will necessarily gain increasing imaginary force.

The ecological imaginary can be expanded further to cosmic or universal dimensions. All cultures have felt the need to imagine the macrocosm and orient themselves in relation to the whole. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry contend that the universe story, taken from contemporary cosmology and transformed into a culturally-orienting narrative “is the only way of providing, in our times, what the mythic stories of the universe provided for tribal peoples and for the earlier classical civilizations in their times.”[43] Through the universe and earth story, people see themselves as part of larger processes of development and “unfolding of the cosmos.” They thus achieve “a sense of relatedness to the various living and nonliving components of the earth community.”[44] These powerful, indeed sublime narratives relativize cultural absolutes and shake the dominant imaginary, just as they give new imaginary meaning to human existence, consciousness and creativity.

Freedom and Domination

The larger processes of self-realization and unfolding of potentialities have often (since Hegel) been described as the emegence of freedom in the history of humanity, the earth, and the universe. A social ecology carries on this tradition and seeks to give an ecological meaning to such a conception of freedom. It rejects both the “negative freedom” of mere non-coercion or “being left alone” of the liberal individualist tradition, and also the “positive freedom” of the “recognition of necessity” found in many strongly organicist forms of holism. A social ecological conception of freedom focuses on the realization of a being’s potentialities for identity, individuality, awareness, complexity, self-determination, relatedness, and wholeness. In this sense, freedom is found to some degree at all levels of being: from the self-organizing and self-stabilizing tendencies of the atom to the level of the entire universe evolving to higher levels of complexity and generating new levels of being. In our own planetary history, embryonic freedom can be found in the directiveness of all life, and takes on increasingly complex forms, including, ultimately, the possibility of humans as complex social beings attaining their good through a highly-developed and respectful relationship to other humans and the natural world. The realization of such freedom requires that humanity attain consciousness of its place in the history of the earth and of the universe, that it develop the ethical responsibility to assume its role in larger processes of self-realization, and that human social institutions be reshaped to embody the conditions that would make this knowledge and ethical commitment into practical historical forces. Bookchin’s conception of “free nature” focuses on the way in which human self-realization, culminating in creation of an ecological society, establishes a growing planetary realm of freedom. This occurs as humanity “add[s] the dimension of freedom, reason, and ethics to first [i.e., non-human] nature and raise[s] evolution to a level of self-reflexivity …” [45] The activity of humanity and human self-realization are thus seen as central to the achievement of freedom in nature.

But there is another, larger ecological dimension to freedom. The realization of planetary freedom requires not only the human self-realization that is emphasized in Bookchin’s “free nature,” but also the human recognition of limits and the human forbearance that is expressed in Arne Naess’s usage of that same term. [46] In this sense, “free nature” is the spontaneous, creative nature that has given rise to the entire rich, diverse system of self-realizing life on this planet. It has also given rise to humanity itself, and dialectically shaped humanity through our interaction with the all the other expressions of this free activity, and made us the complex beings that we are. As necessary as it is for humanity to rectify its disastrous disruptions of natural processes, and although a restorative ecological practice is undoubtedly required, a social ecology must also help humanity regain its capacity for creative non-action, for the Taoist wu wei, for “letting-be.” The social ecological conception of freedom as spontaneous creative order points to the need for a larger sphere of wild nature so that biodiversity can be maintained and evolutionary processes can continue their self-expression, not only in human culture and humanized nature, but in the natural world substantially free of human influence and control. A social ecology therefore implies the necessity not only for wilderness preservation but for an extensive expansion of wilderness (and relative wilderness) areas where they have been largely destroyed.

A social ecology’s vision human freedom and “free nature” is closely related to its fundamental project of critique of the forms of domination that have stood in the way of human and planetary self-realization. However, there have been some widespread misconceptions about the social ecological analysis of domination. These result in part from Bookchin’s definition of social ecology as the view that “ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems,” [47] and his claims that the “quest to dominate nature” results from actual domination within human society. In a sense, contemporary ecophilosophies in general assert that ecological problems stem from social ones. For example, deep ecology holds that ecological problems result from the social problem of anthropocentrism, and ecofeminism holds that ecological problems result from the social problem of patriarchal ideologies and social structures. But there remains a fundamental dispute between those who, like Bookchin, give causal priority in the creation of ecological crisis to social institutions (like capitalism or the state) and others who stress the causal priority of social ideologies (like dualism, anthropocentrism, or patriarchal values).

But both sides in this dispute have often seemed less than dialectical in their approach. The roots of ecological crisis are at once institutional and ideological, psychological and cultural. A critical approach to the issue will avoid both one-sided materialist explanations (identifying economic exploitation or other “material conditions” as “the problem”) and one-sided idealism (identifying a system of ideas like anthropocentrism as “the problem.”) It is indeed tempting to see the emergence of certain hierarchical institutions as the precondition for human destructiveness toward the natural world. Yet these very institutions could only emerge because of the potential for domination, hierarchical values, objectification, and power-seeking that have roots in the human psyche and which are actualized under certain historical conditions. Furthermore, as a system of domination develops it does so through its dialectically interacting institutional, ideological and imaginary spheres, all of which are related to a “transhistorical” human nature developed over a long history of species evolution. Any account of the origins of hierarchy and domination and of their possible “dissolution” must therefore address at once the material, institutional, psychological and even ontological moments of both the development of these phenomena and the process of reversing it.

Eco-Communitarian Politics

A social ecology seeks to restore certain elements of an ancient conception of the political, and to expand the limits of the concept. According to a classic account, if ethics is the pursuit of the good life or self-realization, then politics is the pursuit of the good life in common and self-realization for the whole community. A social ecology affirms the political in this sense, but reinterprets it in ecological terms. It seeks recover our long-obscured nature as zoon politikon and to explore new dimensions of that nature. By this term is meant not simply the “political animal” who participates in civic decision-making processes, but the social and communal being whose selfhood is developed and expressed through active engagement in many dimensions of the life of the community.

A social ecology investigates the ways in which we can encourage the emergence of humane, mutualistic, ecologically-responsible institutions in all areas of social life. It sees not only “politics,” but all areas of social interaction, including production and consumption, personal relationships, family life, child-care, education, the arts, modes of communication, spiritual life, ritual and celebration, recreation and play, and informal modes of cooperation to be political realms in the most profound sense. Each is an essential sphere in which we can develop our social being and communal individuality, and in which a larger communitarian reality can find much of its basis. Such a conception of the political requires that practices and institutions be humane in spirit and scale, life-affirming, creative, decentralized, non-hierarchical, rooted in the particularity of people and place, and based on grassroots, participatory democracy to the greatest degree practically possible.

The social ecological tradition has long emphasized the importance of local democracy. Reclus and Kropotkin both wrote extensively about its history, and Mumford argues that

“the neighborhood … must be built again into an active political unit, if our democracy is to become active and invigorated once more, as it was two centuries ago in the New England village, for that was a superior political unit. The same principles apply again to the city and the interrelationship of cities in a unified urban and regional network or grid.” [48]

This conception of regional democracy based in local democracy is a corollary of the general social ecological conception (expressed by Geddes) of regional and larger communities growing out of household, neighborhood, and local communities.

Bookchin has carried on this tradition in arguing for the liberatory potential of the town or neighborhood assembly, and has given his libertarian predecessors’ ideas of social and political decentralization a more specific and concrete expression. He and other social ecologists point out the ways in which such an assembly offers the community an arena in which its needs and aspirations can be formulated publicly in an active and creative manner, and in which a strong and vital citizenship can be developed and exercised in practice. The community assembly offers a means through which a highly-valued multiplicity and diversity can be unified and coordinated, as the citizens engage practically in the pursuit of the good of the whole community. It is also on a scale at which the community’s many-sided relationship to its specific ecological and bioregional milieu can be vividly grasped and achieve political expression.

What is debated vigorously among social ecologists is the validity of a “libertarian municipalism” that would make a program of creating local assembly government and federations of libertarian municipalities into a privileged politics of social ecology. In this ideology, the citizens (as Bookchin defines them) and the municipalist movement assume much of the historical role of the working class and the party in classical Marxist theory, and are endowed with a similar mystique. Yet, it seems clear that the municipalist program and Bookchin’s new “revolutionary subject” cannot be uniquely deduced from the general premises of social ecological analysis, nor can they be shown to be the only plausible basis for an ecological politics. It is therefore not surprising that most activists influenced by social ecology do not direct most of their efforts into municipalism, but rather work in many political, economic and cultural realms. [49]

A social ecology recognizes that political forms, as important as they may be, are given meaning and realize whatever liberatory and communitarian potential they may have within a larger political culture. The political culture is thus both historically and theoretically more fundamental. Consequently, when contemplating a promising political form, a social ecology will consider the ways in which the political culture may limit or liberate the potentials in that form. The institution of the assembly, for example, possesses not only the potential to foster freedom, authentic democracy, solidarity and civic virtue, but also a considerable potential for the generation of elitism, egotism, domineering personality traits, and power-seeking behavior. Such dangers are avoided not only through procedures within assemblies themselves, but above all by the creation of a communitarian, democratic culture that will express itself in decision-making bodies and in all other institutions. For assemblies and other organs of direct democracy to contribute effectively to an ecological community, they must be purged of the competitive, agonistic, masculinist aspects that have often corrupted them. They can only fulfill their democratic promise if they are an integral expression of a cooperative community that embodies in its institutions the love of humanity and nature.

Barber makes exactly this point when he states that “strong” democracy “attempts to balance adversary politics by nourishing the mutualistic art of listening,” and going beyond mere toleration, seeks “common rhetoric evocative of a common democratic discourse” that should “encompass the affective as well as the cognitive mode.” [50] Such concerns echo recent contributions in feminist ethics, which have pointed out that the dominant moral and political discourse have exhibited a one-sided emphasis on ideas and principles, and neglected the realm of feeling and sensibility. In this spirit, a social ecology will explore the ways in which the transition from formal to substantive democracy depends not only on the establishment of more radically democratic forms, but on the establishment of cultural practices that foster a democratic sensibility.

Social Eco-nomics

In view of the dominance of the economic in contemporary society and the importance of the economic in any society, a social ecology must devote considerable attention to the means of creating a socially and ecologically responsible system of production and consumption. Bookchin has stressed the contribution that can be made by such alternatives as community credit unions, community supported agriculture, community gardens, “civic banks to fund municipal enterprises and land purchases” and community-owned enterprises. [51] In a discussion of how a municipalist movement might be initiated practically, he presents proposals that emphasize cooperatives and small individually-owned businesses. He suggests that the process could begin with the public purchase of unprofitable enterprises (which would then be managed by the workers), the establishment of land trusts, and the support for small-scale productive enterprises. He concludes that in such a system “cooperatives, farms, and small retail outlets would be fostered with municipal funds and placed under growing public control.” [52] Taken together, such suggestions describe the beginnings of a “Green economics” that could have a major transformative effect on society. [53]

One of the most compelling aspects of Bookchin’s political thought is the centrality of his ethical critique of the dominant economistic society, and his call for the creation of a “moral economy” as a precondition for a just ecological society. He asserts that such a “moral economy” implies the emergence of “a productive community” to replace the amoral “mere marketplace,” that currently prevails. It requires further that producers “explicitly agree to exchange their products and services on terms that are not merely ‘equitable’ or ‘fair’ but supportive of each other.” [54] Such an analysis assumes that if the prevailing system of economic exploitation and the dominant economistic culture based on it are to be eliminated, a sphere must be created in which people find new forms of exchange to replace the capitalist market, and this sphere must be capable of continued growth. Bookchin sees this realm as that of the municipalized economy, in which property becomes “part of a larger whole that is controlled by the citizen body in assembly as citizens.” [55]

However, for the present at least, it is not clear why the municipalized economic sector should be looked upon as the primary realm, rather than as one area among many in which significant economic transformation might begin. It is possible to imagine a broad spectrum of self-managed enterprises, individual producers and small partnerships that would enter into a growing cooperative economic sector that would incorporate social ecological values. The extent to which the strong communitarian principle of distribution according to need could be achieved would be proportional to the degree to which cooperative and communitarian values had evolved — a condition that would depend on complex historical factors that cannot be predicted beforehand.

Bookchin suggests that in a transitional phase the “rights” of the small businesses will not be infringed upon, [56] though his goal is a fully-developed municipalist system in which these businesses will not be allowed to exist. It is far from obvious, however, why these enterprises should not continue to exist in the long term, alongside more cooperative forms of production, as long as the members of the community choose to support them. There is no conclusive evidence that such small enterprises are necessarily exploitative or that they cannot be operated in an ecologically sound manner. Particularly if the larger enterprises in a regional economy are democratically operated, the persistence of such small individual enterprises does not seem incompatible with social ecological values. This possibility is even more plausible to the degree that the community democratically establishes just and effective parameters of social and ecological responsibility. The dogmatic assertion that in an ecological society only one form of economic organization can exist (whether municipalized enterprises or any other form) is incompatible with the affirmation of historical openness and social creativity and imagination that is basic to a social ecology.

The New Leviathan

If a social ecology cannot be dogmatic in its economic prescriptions for the future, it must be entirely forthright in its judgment concerning the dominant role of global corporate capital in today’s intensifying social and ecological crisis. While some social ecologists have repeated vague cliches about the market and capitalism (sometimes confusedly conflating the two), social ecological analysis consistently results in the inescapable conclusion that the growing global dominance of corporate power is the major institutional factor in the crisis. Whatever good intentions individual employees, managers, executives and stockholders may have, large corporations operate according to the constraints built into their organizational structures and according to the requirements of global economic competition. To the degree that the prevailing conception of global “free trade” is realized in practice, a corporation that operates according to ecologically optimal decision-making processes will be devoured by its more ruthlessly rational competitors. While there are in some cases strong incentives for transnational corporations to appear socially and ecologically responsible, there are stronger pragmatic requirements of rational self-interest that they act in socially and ecologically irresponsible ways. A social ecology must therefore concern itself with the various means by which more responsible decision-making might be achieved. This might include regulation by local, regional and national governmental bodies, organization of consumers, organization of workers, transformation of organizational structures of existing enterprises, creation of new and more responsible forms of economic organization, and various forms of citizens’ direct action. The effectiveness of any of these approaches can only be determined through experience and experimentation. There has been no convincing demonstration that change in personal and cultural values, changes in individual behavior, regulatory legislation, structural political and economic reform, citizens’ direct action, voluntary association, and large-scale resistance movements do not each have roles to play in social ecological transformation under various historical conditions.

To date, the best general assessment of economic globalization and corporate power from a social ecological perspective is Athanasiou’s Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor. [57] Athanasiou points out how the link between systemic social issues and ecological crisis is increasingly becoming evident. He notes, for example, that while until recently “only a few isolated radicals saw the Third World’s crushing international debt as a green issue, it is well known as a key link in the fiscal chains strangling the world’s ecosystems.” [58] Athanasiou presents a model of social ecological analysis that goes far beyond generalizations about a human “quest for domination” or a “grow or die” economy. For example, he explains how in return for loans, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank impose on poor countries “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) that are socially and ecologically disastrous, as rational they may seem from a narrow economistic perspective. SAPs demand drastic reductions in public spending for education, health, housing and other social goods, eliminate subsidies for agriculture, food and social services, encourage production for export, eliminate trade barriers, raise interest rates and lower wages. The result is a more rationalized and superficially stable economy in which poverty increases, the quality of life declines for most people, and environmental destruction accelerates to fuel export-based production.

The phenomenon of globalization shows with increasing clarity the link between transnational capital, the state, the technological system, and the growing and intimately interrelated social and ecological crises. There is no better example of the power of broad social ecological analysis.

The Future of Social Ecology

Future research in social ecology will consist of much more detailed study of these issues and many other questions related to the development of the global economic, political and technological systems and the resulting social and ecological consequences. The critical theoretical framework of social ecology will become richer and more highly articulated as it incorporates these empirically-based studies. At the same time, its theoretical vision of a communitarian regionalism will be enriched and rendered more determinate by the proliferation of empirical, experiential projects in the tradition of Geddes’ regional survey, and its political and economic theory will be transformed as evidence is assimilated from continuing experiments in ecological and communitarian organization and social practice.

Social ecology is at the present moment in a stage of rapid transformation, self-reflection, and expansion of its theoretical horizons. It is in the process of escaping from the dogmatic tendencies that have threatened its theoretical vitality and practical relevance, and the sectarian narrowness that has reactively defined it in opposition to other ecophilosophies. It is ready to withdraw from the “contest of ecologies” and move forward in its theoretical development, in creative dialogue with other philosophies. [59] It is now in a position to realize its potential as a holistic and dialectical philosophy that seeks greater openness and opportunity for growth, works toward a more adequate synthesis of theoretical reflection and empirical inquiry, attains an increasingly comprehensive theoretical scope, and strives for a truly dialectical relation to creative social practice — offering the guidance of reflection and remaining open to guidance by the truth of experience.

The project of a social ecology will certainly gain impetus through the growing awareness of global ecological crisis and deterioration of the ties of human community. Yet it will be moved and inspired most by its affirmative ecological faith — by its love of humanity in all its magnificent expressions, its wonder at the diverse manifestations of life on earth, and its awe at the mystery of being. It will also learn to accept human limitations and the tragic dimension of history, and put aside the illusions of shallow progressivism, revolutionary fantasy, and Promethean heroism. It will find hope rather in a vision of the human community — freed from its quest for domination of self, of others, of objects, of nature — realizing its own good through participating in and contributing to the good of the larger community of life. In pursuing this vision, social ecology realizes its deepest meaning as a reflection on the earth household, a reflection that reveals our place as companions in our common journey.

[2] “Social ecology” is also an interdisciplinary field of academic study that investigates the interrelationship between human social institutions and ecological or environmental issues. It is closely related to human ecology, the area of the biological sciences that deals with the role of human beings in ecosystems. However, studies in social ecology are much broader in scope, incorporating many areas of social and natural science in their analysis. This interdisciplinary social ecology offers much of the empirical data which philosophical social ecology utilizes in its theoretical reflection.

[3] See especially Fields, Factories and Workshops (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968) and Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizons, 1955) for important discussions of many of these topics, and his pamphlet, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1970) on communitarian and democratic traditions.

[4] For the first English translation of some of Reclus’ most important texts, and an extensive commentary on his thought, see John Clark and Camille Martin,Liberty, Equality, Geography: The Social Thought of Elisée Reclus (Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications, 1996). For a concise discussion of Reclus’ relevance to contemporary ecological thought, see John Clark, “The Dialectical Social Geography of Elisée Reclus” in Philosophy and Geography 1 (forthcoming).

[5] For discussions of Geddes’ guiding values of “Sympathy, Synthesis and Synergy,” and his regional concepts of “Place, Work, and Folk,” see Murdo Macdonald, “Patrick Geddes in Context” in The Irish Review (Autumn/Winter 1994) and “Art and the Context in Patrick Geddes’ Work” in Spazio e Società/Space and Society (Oct.-Dec. 1994): 28–39.

[7] Mumford did not choose to coin any convenient term to epitomize his social theory. I take the term “ecological regionalism” from Mark Luccarelli’s very helpful study, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).

[13] An adequate account of the eco-communitarian tradition would explore Buber’s enormous contribution. See his major political work, Paths in Utopia(Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), including his chapters on his predecessors Kropotkin and Landauer, and, especially, his essay, “In the Midst of Crisis.” Significantly, Buber defines the “social” in terms of the degree to which the “center” extends outward, and is “earthly,” “creaturely,” and “attached.” (p. 135).

[14] Bookchin’s best presentation of his version of social ecology is found in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982).

[15] Unfortunately, he lapses into the undialectical “fallacy that technology is a neutral tool to be used or abused by the one who wields it,” as David Watson notes in Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology (Brooklyn, NY and Detroit, MI: Autonomedia and Black & Red, 1996), p. 119. See the entire chapter, “The social ecologist as technocrat” (pp. 119–167) for a careful dissection of Bookchin’s technological optimism from a social ecological perspective.

[16] All done in the name of such values as “mutuality” and “cooperation,” and on behalf of an “ethics of complementarity”!

[20] The ecological and cosmic evolutionary implications that are implicit in a Whiteheadian “philosophy of organism” are elaborated eloquently in Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., The Liberation of Life (Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1990).

[21] See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1961) and The Future of Man. (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

[24] We do not simply “identify” with a larger whole, but rather explore specific modes of relatedness and develop our outlook and feelings in relation to what we discover about self and other. In this analysis, a dialectical social ecology has more in common with eco-feminist thought than with those ecological theories that stress “expanded” selfhood.

[25] As in Eric Katz’s very useful discussion in “Organism, Community, and the ‘Substitution Problem’” in Environmental Ethics 7 (1985): 241–256. Katz raises many important issues, though he overstates the opposition between the two approaches by interpreting them as rather rigid “models.”

[26] The most flagrant case is Tom Regan’s attack on “Holism as Environmental Fascism” in his essay “Ethical Vegetarianism and Commercial Animal Farming,” reprinted in James White, ed. Contemporary Moral Problems (St. Paul MN: West Publishing Co., 1988): 327–341. Note Mumford’s severe critique, from a holistic, “organicist” perspective, of the extreme, totalizing holism of Teilhard de Chardin in The Pentagon of Power, pp. 314–319.

[27] The concept of the “holon” was first proposed by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967), ch. 3 and passim. Its fundamental importance has recently been defended by Ken Wilber. For a concise discussion of Wilber’s analysis of holons, their characteristics of “identity,” “autonomy” and “agency,” and their constitution of “holarchies,” see A Brief History of Everything, ch. 1.

[28] One of the most dialectical moves in recent ecological thought is Gary Snyder’s choice of the title “No Nature” for his collected poems. Starting out from Hakuin’s allusion to “self-nature that is no nature,” he reminds us corrigible logocentrists, “Nature is not a book.” No Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. v, 381.

[30]History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 161. It is in relation to this idea of the primordial continuum of being that Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical phenomenology can make an important contribution to a social ecology. David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “the Flesh,” as “the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity.” [David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), p. 66.] This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality. Merleau-Ponty himself refers to “that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break; it has neither the tight construction of the mechanism nor the transparency of a whole which precedes its parts.” [“The Concept of Nature, I” in Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 65–66.]

[33] According to Harris, Hegel sees religion “as the felt awareness and conviction of the infinite immanent and potent in all reality, in both nature and history, and transcendent above all finite existence,” and as “one form of that final self-realization of the whole which is the truth, and without which there would be no dynamic to propel the dialectical process,” so that, consequently, “[t]o repudiate spirit and reject all religion is thus to paralyze the dialectic, and in effect to abandon it.” Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, p. 54. If we are careful to read “transcendent” as “trans-finite” and not as “supernatural,” and if we remember that no self-realization of the whole is “final,” then this also describes an important aspect of the meaning of “spirituality” for a dialectical holism.

[34] “The Marriage of Radical Ecologies” in Zimmerman et al., Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 1st ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), p. 410–11. While social ecology and other Western ecophilosophies have come to terms with unity-in-diversity, perhaps they would do well to consider the radically dialectical concept of difference-non-difference, the bhedabhedavada of Indian philosophy.

[46] The extent to which Bookchin holds a Promethean view of human activity is suggested when he asks how humanity is “to organize a ‘free nature.’” (“What Is Social Ecology?” in Zimmerman, et al. Environmental Philosophy, 1st ed., p. 370.

[49] Bookchin’s reduction of eco-communitarian politics to libertarian municipalism is a deeply flawed, undialectical and fundamentally dogmatic political problematic, and it is not possible to discuss most of its shortcoming here. For a detailed critique, see John Clark, “Municipal Dreams: Murray Bookchin’s Idealist Politics” in Andrew Light, ed., Social Ecology After Bookchin (New York: Guilford Publications, forthcoming).

[50] Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 176.

[53] Brian Tokar, in his book The Green Alternative, has sketched an even more extensive Green economic program, based on what is fundamentally a social ecological analysis. Tokar’s concise and well-written introduction to the Green movement should be consulted for a clear example of an experimental, non-dogmatic social ecological politics and economics. See The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future (San Pedro, CA: R. & E. Miles, 1992).

Sitting in a car with a dance colleague of mine at Earthdance, he articulated having a bit of an existential crisis. He wondered, How does somatic study effect change? How does studying the pelvis, simply because one can afford to, effect a change? He knew my innate radical nature and differing status (culturally and economically) and thought if anyone had thought of these things, it was me. He was right. I responded something to the extent of the following.

We aren’t studying our bodies for ourselves. We are doing it for the good of all. Chaos theory. Who knows better than a contacter, a kind of body physicist, that how we inhabit ourselves and how we move affects others. My energy affects people, and so does yours. Having a body is universal to the human condition. I can only begin to understand others if I can first establish a relationship with myself. Fostering self-awareness in the deepest, intuitive levels helps others understand their relationship to their own body-mind, which in turn bridges the idea of “self” and “other” into all. I don’t spend time learning about my pelvis because it is my pelvis but because it is ours.

How does self-study affect the people around me? If I have a working understanding of what it is to exist in a body, and I allow things to resonate within me, how can I desire anything but sustainability and ease for who or what’s around me? If I find psychosomatic healing for myself, I believe that together we are capable of healing. Offering these teachings to underserved communities toward this purpose can remove the ideas of commodifiability and gain and instead center the work on the human desire for exchange.

Contact Improvisation is simply teaching us about our own humanness. It teaches us about loving ourselves and each other on a concrete and nonromantic level. Perhaps this form teaches us to love being human and therefore find love in all humans? At the least, it begins to teach us understanding and acceptance.

12 Radical Lessons Contact Improvisation Offers

1) It is important to dance with yourself and be present with where you are before engaging with another.

2) The problems that manifest as restrictions to flow in your dancing are often applicable to some aspect of your mind.

3) Physically trusting yourself and your partner in contact allows the ability to manifest that trust in oneself and others in your regular pedestrian life.

4) In contact, we must be able to sense through a person’s body, his/her anatomy and energetic output—getting to really “know” some aspect of a person that is NOT superficial.

5) We must also learn to be ready to allow someone to “know” our physical and energetic bodies in a nonsexual but intimate way.

6) We learn to lead and follow in dialogue with something that is outside our own ideas. Wherever one might think intuition comes from, we must learn to allow it, not only for safety but also so that the dance might unfold.

7) We learn our habits of control and how to be free from them.

8) We learn the difference between doing and not doing and the importance of them both.

9) We learn that we can take care of ourselves, and that taking care of others in an imposing way only prevents them from finding ways of taking care of themselves.

10) We learn to listen to ourselves and each other in ways that are nonjudgmental, efficient, and not logic based.

11) We learn to value others as we value ourselves.

12) Contact teaches us that we already know.Isa Leal, BA, Theatre and Dance, Figure Space Alum, is an international touring and teaching artist who focuses on the power of authentic engagement toward empathic action as a tool for social change.

]]>https://7scales.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/on-embodiment-and-social-change-lessons-learned-from-contact-improvisation/feed/0andreiasofiapaixaoContact Improvisation and Social Transformation: Thoughts on the cultural evolution of a social dance formhttps://7scales.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/contact-improvisation-and-social-transformation-thoughts-on-the-cultural-evolution-of-a-social-dance-form/
https://7scales.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/contact-improvisation-and-social-transformation-thoughts-on-the-cultural-evolution-of-a-social-dance-form/#respondTue, 24 Feb 2015 12:38:07 +0000http://7scales.wordpress.com/?p=228http://www.contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/newsletter/view/contact-improvisation-and-social-transformation#$

by Andreas Demmel

This text is a tailored and reedited version of a talk I gave in August 2013 at the International Contact Improvisation Festival in FREIBURG, GERMANY. It was a big chunk of my research compressed into 12 minutes. So in a way it is mainly a possibility to surf through this large field, this larger operation of weaving together and building bridges between valuable approaches and practises that will help us pave the way into the next millennia… enjoy! [A.D.]

During the last three years, my life became an experiment. My interest was to get a holistic experience of life through my own body’s experience. And so, instead of sticking with one thing, I surfed through different worlds. In the end, what I did was to balance three things.

The three things were:

–dancing/artistic research

–building and maintaining sustainable gardens

–studying various forms of psychotherapy—traditional as well as modern healing approaches, including shamanic rituals, but mainly the modern systemic and transpersonal forms of experiential psychotherapy.

Through the combined experience of these three things in three years, incredible things happened to me, all of which made me realize that there needed to be bridges between these three. Through my longing to contribute to the creation of these bridges, I became part of some projects.

In Berlin I was part of a group researching the interface between systemic constellation work and choreography. Systemic Constellations is a method originally from group psychotherapy in which solutions to tricky issues of a client are found through setting up constellations with the group members, who represent the client’s family or relationship system. It allows us to expand into systemic consciousness through phenomenological observation of somatic impulses. The phenomenon of representation in this therapeutic method and the deep dive into improvisation, which are so similar, deserve a combined research.

Through my time living in Israel in the desert, my engagement with nature, the constellation work, and also my time building gardens in Bavaria, I developed an awareness of deep ecology and the value of working with the earth (with my hands). All together, this made me realise the importance of work that helps us to reconnect with the body in a deep way again.

Then again in Berlin (but also in other places), the connection of transpersonal psychology, systemic constellation work, and conscious sexuality helped me become aware of the massive sexual wounding and distortion that exists in larger parts of Western culture around sexuality and romantic relationships.

Through all that work of building bridges, three points became really important for me:

1. It makes a difference if I consider myself as living on the earth or as being the earth. Maybe we are not living on that earth, but we are that earth.

2. Consciousness seems to want to expand in all possible directions, and that’s what it is doing: evolving and expanding in all kinds of new forms.

3. I’d really like to become more and more aware of the questions, Who are we as humans, and what are we becoming?

In my perspective, Contact Improvisation is just one powerful tool within the larger process of consciousness evolution.

I think the practise of Contact Improvisation is, like many other methods, at the same time overestimated and underestimated.

Look at what is happening with all these new practises that support us to re- connect in a deep way. They are growing. The Freiburg Festival is sold out within an hour, and many more new contact festivals emerge. We see lots of new workshops and seminars sprouting all over the globe, and amongst the variety that grows, it is no longer only dancing that we encounter.

More and more diverse and refined practises emerge from or connect with the Contact Improv field—practices concerned with awareness, relationships, evolution, somatic experiencing, sexuality, nature awareness, infant developmental patterns, and more. The dance seems to be no longer the actual substance on its own but becomes a carrier of an alchemical process in which we all meet.

The field of people who come to such a festival also gets more and more diverse. For sure we are all dancers, but besides that, we are actors, political activists, therapists, nature lovers, new creative heads for new forms of politics, media, business & economy, teachers, and educators: people who shape our societies (ideally more and more).

It was and is also a tribal experience that is happening at all these festivals. Something that was initially just a Contact Tribe develops, becoming more diverse, and what we see are different tribes that meet and co-exist. (Especially through the festivals that mix a lot of approaches.) So this tribe or these tribes also create a new sense of belonging that is not to be underestimated in a world where often the societies and groups we grew up in no longer offer something exciting to belong to.

I am really excited about that, and I think all these meetings are incredibly stimulating!

I not only want to locate Contact as a part of somatic practises but also want to group it within a larger context amongst all the practises and methods that help us break the totalitarian and colonialist body/mind-sets that we still have in our bodies—methods that help us to break structures that have shaped us from outside for hundreds of years and to reconnect with our inner guidance.

And if we locate Contact just as a tiny patch in all that, all this movement becomes suddenly really powerful. Right now we are in 2014—some people thought it would never happen. For me it was a mind-blowing year so far. How was it for you?

In a lot of spiritual practices, especially in Buddhism, they ask you to decide upon one practise. For some people or for certain periods, that might be really helpful. But in my experience, it is really the act of weaving together, the combining of practices that supports sustainable change.

We live in a world that is getting more and more complex in every moment. So this complexity asks for a systemic approach.

We are facing ecological disasters, the sucking out of the earth by humanity. Whole mountains get blown up, and deep in the earth, precious resources are mined excessively.

There is a great disbalance in the relationship between us and the planet. We take more than the earth can grow back. It is an unbalanced relationship, like a sexually confused relationship.

I really want to draw a connection to Contact Improvisation here. What we do here while dancing Contact is learn about relationships, and learn how to balance them—constantly, in every dance. This whole global rebalancing and reconnection process is a complex operation of all these different forms.

What does this mean for us in the self-realisation process? For one thing, there is the process of letting go of pain—something that we see often in the festivals. We come to a point at which we identify certain parts of ourselves—of our soul, body, and identity—that come to the surface, and we realise that they do not really serve us anymore. A lot of people at a certain point then let go of a lot of body tension and then they cry, and every tear melts the tension, the ice block around our heart. So we experience the letting go of pain, and what do we have then?

We need to integrate pleasure. The now-opened parts of the body long for new information, so the new thing is the integration of pleasure. We become open and relaxed for all the strength and power that wants to flow into our bodies. This can become a practise of surrendering, letting go of old patterns and inviting new strength. And believe me, there is endless strength that is provided, endless strength that wants to flow through us and fill us once we dare to let go of tension and receive it.

Stopping the tension can allow the energy in and supports us to move out of the toxic symbiosis and dependency we are in—with people and the planet— and helps us to grow into true autonomy, power, love, and a new sense of responsibility that is not overwhelming.

I see all these festivals as a part of our cultural evolution. It’s a new culture emerging, with all its rituals and ways to do things. It is like a new tribe. We experience split-offs and new ideas that grow and battle about what is better than the other idea.

I think here we can learn more about how our world works than ever before.Andreas Demmel loves to support people in unfolding their potential through ever-changing alchemistic recipes put together from various tools originating from experiential body-centered therapy, systemic constellation work, somatic practices, and conscious sexuality work.

From Community Supported Art in Canada to a New York project that stages work in laundromats, Laura Zabel looks at the ways in which artists and communities can pull together
St Paul mayor Chris Coleman at the launch of the Irrigate project
St Paul mayor Chris Coleman at the launch of the Irrigate project. Photograph: Springboard for the Arts
Laura Zabel
executive director of Springboard for the Arts

Thursday 12 February 2015 11.10 GMT Last modified on Thursday 12 February 2015 14.26 GMT
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From income inequality and unemployment to poverty, education and healthcare, communities around the world are facing critical challenges that require creative ideas and solutions. Any of these challenges could use an artist’s mind, a creative question or a critical thinker to help us find our way to a more healthy and just future. Artists can illuminate truth, offer transcendent experience in a far too literal world, challenge us to feel, and connect us to our common humanity.

The good news is that almost every community already has artists. Often, though, this readily available resource is untapped and underdeveloped. Communities need better tools to help them find and collaborate with artists, while artists need not just an invitation but a charge to engage with their communities.

In cities around the globe, there is an exciting movement afoot to share ideas and models that help connect artists more deeply with their communities. From Santiago, Chile, to St Paul, Minnesota, local citizens are partnering with artists to address challenges and make positive change.

This movement isn’t about positioning artists as special outsiders who parachute in with easy fixes, but as neighbours who are one part of a whole set of things a community can do to be healthy. Nor is this movement about artists volunteering their skills, or being asked to contribute their skills “for exposure” – rather, it’s about artists who are justly compensated for their work and skills.

Of course, not all examples in this movement play it this way. But that’s what they should strive for: a point where all participants are valued for their unique contributions. Here are some projects that demonstrate the potential of artists to help create vital and just communities.

Community Supported Art (US, Canada)
How do you build a direct connection between artists and community members that is simple, fun and organic? You look to a model that’s working in an adjacent field. Modelled on community supported agriculture, in which people buy seasonal produce directly from local farms, Community Supported Art commissions artists to create original work, which is then sold as “shares” to interested collectors. Artists and buyers come together for pickup parties, creating a direct connection between community members and artists that lasts well beyond the scope of the project. Community supported art programs now exist in 40 neighbourhoods in the US and beyond.

Neighbourhood Postcard Project (US, Chile)
When artist Hunter Franks was working with youth in the Bayview neighbourhood of San Francisco, California in 2013, he asked what they wanted to improve about their neighbourhood. They told him what they wanted to change the most was people’s impression of Bayview, an area that was mostly in the news for the wrong reasons. The Neighborhood Postcard Project was born. Now in cities from Santiago to Detroit, stories from residents in underinvested communities are collected on postcards and sent to random people in the same city to break down stereotypes and build new community connection.

Gap Filler (New Zealand)
After the initial recovery period following a natural or manmade disaster, communities face unforeseen challenges such as vacant spaces, low community morale and negative perceptions. Following the September 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Gap Filler project collaborated with creative stakeholders across the city to make and place temporary projects that bring people together and experiment with space. Highlights included a coin-operated public dancefloor, a community pizza oven and the Commons, a new public gathering area. The organisation’s commitment to community engagement is shaping the future of the city.

The Laundromat Project (US)
“Go to where the people are” is a phrase that should always be step one in community engagement strategies. In order to amplify the creative power of artists, the Laundromat Project in New York has made this their core principle. Based in Harlem, the project supports artists to create new, community-engaged work based in laundromats, a place where people are going to be and have the time to collaborate. Projects have included renaming streets based on personal and social history, transforming laundromats into yoga studios or English classrooms, and creating community mix tapes. This approach opens communities to new ideas of what it means to be an artist and builds power through creative expression.
Irrigate mobilised the skills of more than 600 local artists
Theatre of the Oppressed (Brazil, India and more)
Drawing on the work of Brazilian director and politician Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed is a model that brings together marginalised individuals with professional actors to create plays based on their real-life experience. The process engages the audience to solve the underlying problems through activism, advocacy, legislation, policy change and more. In Bangalore, India theatre performances are used to address issues ranging from government corruption and police harassment to how to improve communications between doctors and patients.

Irrigate (US)
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A major three-year light rail construction project through the heart of St Paul, Minnesota, could have been a major hardship for city residents and small businesses along the route. Irrigate, however, mobilised the skills and power of more than 600 local artists to offset the impact of the construction with more than 150 place-making art projects, turning disrupted neighbourhoods into destinations. These projects included murals, performances in restaurants and parking lots, plus giant puppets that acted as business signage. These projects created a positive counter-narrative of joy, surprise and commitment to the communities in the construction zone.

These projects demonstrate our responsibility as artists and as citizens to look for the open doors where change is possible. There is an urgent need for us to step up and to build the bridges between disparate groups that are necessary for communities and cultures to move forward. To do this artists need access to skills, resources and systems of investment and engagement. If we can create these mechanisms, they will reward us by changing our neighbourhoods and cities in ways both practical and transformational.

Laura Zabel is executive director of Springboard for the Arts, which operates Creative Exchange, a platform for sharing free toolkits and resources for artists and communities

Join our community of arts, culture and creative professionals by signing up free to the Guardian Culture Pros Network.

At least not of the traditional, compulsory, watch-the-clock-until-the-bell-rings kind. As a growing movement of unschoolers believe, a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set ’em free.

By: Ben Hewitt Aug 12, 2014

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Rye Hewitt putting his pack basket, which he wove himself, to good use. He and his brother Fin learned how to make the wooden baskets from a friend of the family who also unschools her children. Photo: Penny Hewitt

In early September, in a clapboard house situated on 43 acres just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12, the younger 9, and they rise to a day that has barely emerged from the clutches of dark. It is not yet autumn, but already the air has begun to change, the soft nights of late summer lengthening and chilling into the season to come. Outside the boys’ bedroom window, the leaves on the maples are just starting to turn.
School is back in session and has been for two weeks or more, but the boys are unhurried. They dress slowly, quietly. Faded and frayed thrift-store camo pants. Flannel shirts. Rubber barn boots. Around their waists, leather belts with knife sheaths. In each sheath, a fixed-blade knife.

By 6:30, with the first rays of sun burning through the ground-level fog, the boys are outside. At some point in the next hour, a yellow school bus will rumble past the end of the driveway that connects the farm to the town road. The bus will be full of children the boys’ age, their foreheads pressed against the glass, gazing at the unfurling landscape, the fields and hills and forests of the small working-class community they call home.

The boys will pay the bus no heed. This could be because they will be seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast with their parents. Or it might be because they are already deep in the woods below the house, where a prolific brook trout stream sluices through a stand of balsam fir; there is an old stone bridge abutment at the stream’s edge, and the boys enjoy standing atop it, dangling fresh-dug worms into the water. Perhaps they won’t notice the bus because they are already immersed in some other project: tillering a longbow of black locust, or starting a fire over which to cook the quartet of brookies they’ve caught. They heat a flat rock at the fire’s edge, and the hot stone turns the fishes’ flesh milky white and flaky.

Or maybe the boys will pay the bus no heed because its passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they’ve never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gazes shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless hours and interminable minutes until release.

Maybe the boys are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Fin and Rye, and maybe, if my wife, Penny, and I get our way, they will never go to school.

Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?

There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is.

It is already obvious that unschooling is radically different from institutionalized classroom learning, but how does it differ from more common homeschooling? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. While most homeschooled children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers like Fin and Rye have almost total autonomy over their days. At ages that would likely see them in seventh and fourth grades, I generously estimate that my boys spend no more than two hours per month sitting and studying the subjects, such as science and math, that are universal to mainstream education. Not two hours per day or even per week. Two hours per month. Comparatively speaking, by now Fin would have spent approximately 5,600 hours in the classroom. Rye, nearly three years younger, would have clocked about half that time.
A stubborn calf. Fin and Rye also take care of their own dwarf goats. Photo: Penny Hewitt
If this sounds radical, it’s only because you’re not taking a long enough view, for the notion that children should spend the majority of their waking hours confined to a classroom enjoys scant historical precedent.
A stubborn calf. Fin and Rye also take care of their own dwarf goats. Photo: Penny Hewitt
The first incidence of compulsory schooling came in 1852, when Massachusetts required communities to offer free public education and demanded that every child between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school for at least 12 weeks per year. Over the next seven decades, the remaining states adopted similar laws, and by 1918, the transition to mandated public education was complete.

It was not long before some parents and even educators began to question the value of compulsory education. One of those was John Holt, a Yale graduate and teacher at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School who published his observations in How Children Fail in 1964. Ultimately selling more than a million copies, it was an indictment of the education system, asserting that children are born with deep curiosity and love of learning, both of which are diminished in school.

Holt became a passionate advocate for homeschooling, which existed in a legal gray area, but he quickly realized that some parents were simply replicating the classroom. So in 1977, in his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, he coined a new term: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools noncompulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people, i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”

Holt died in 1985, having authored 11 books on child development. But along with veteran teacher John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, he popularized a movement. Well, maybe popularized is a tad generous; while it’s generally accepted that unschoolers comprise about 10 percent of the 1.8 million American children who learn at home, hard numbers are scarce.

In addition to fundamental curricular differences, there is also something of a cultural schism between the two styles. Home-schooling is popularly associated with strong religious views (in a 2007 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was part of their choice), while unschooling seems to have no such association. “Unschooling has always been sort of code for being secular,” explains Patrick Farenga, who runs the unschooling website JohnHoltGWS.com. “It’s about understanding that learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else and only under a specialist’s gaze. It’s about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world alongside their families and communities.”

I can almost hear you thinking, Sure, but you live in the sticks, and you both work at home. What about the rest of us? And it’s true: Penny and I have made what most would consider an extreme choice. I write from home, and we both run our farm, selling produce and meat to help pay the bills. Everyone we know who unschools, in fact, has chosen autonomy over affluence. Hell, some years we’re barely above the poverty line. But the truth is, unschooling isn’t merely an educational choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.
And it can happen anywhere; these concepts are not the sole domain of rural Vermont hill farmers living out their Jeffersonian fantasies. Kerry McDonald left a career in corporate training to unschool two of her four children in Boston, though her husband, Brian, still works as a technology consultant. “The city is our curriculum,” says McDonald. “We believe that kids learn by living in the world around them, so we immerse them in that world.” Their “classrooms”—sidewalks, museums, city parks—may appear drastically different from those of my sons. But the ethos remains the same, that a child’s learning is as natural and easy as breathing.

Unschooling is also perfectly legal in all 50 states, so long as certain basic stipulations—from simple notification to professional evaluations, “curriculum” approval, and even home visits—are met. But many unschoolers have been reticent to stand up and be counted, perhaps because the movement tends to attract an independent-thinking, antiauthoritarian personality type.

To the extent that I hadn’t demonstrated these qualities previously, the arrival of my 16th birthday provided ample opportunity, rooted in two events of great and lasting importance. The first, of course, was the acquisition of my driver’s license. This came with a craptastic Volkswagen Rabbit that my mother had driven for the past half-dozen years and sold to me for $200.

The second was the quiet arrival of Vermont’s minimum dropout age. More than three million American teens leave school annually, a number that makes up about 8 percent of the nation’s 16-to-24-year-olds. Dropouts comprise 75 percent of state inmates and 59 percent of those in federal prison. They earn, on average, $260,000 less than graduates over their lifetimes.
My 16th birthday came on November 23, 1987; by the end of that day, my freshly minted driver’s license was cooling in my wallet. And by the midpoint of my junior year, I had pointed that little Rabbit, already bearing the scratch-and-dent evidence of my negligence, out of my high school’s parking lot for the last time.

The irony of my dropping out can hardly be overstated. At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins—was employed by none other than Vermont’s Department of Education. My mother graduated from Iowa’s Grinnell College and was a substitute teacher. My family’s immersion in structured education was total. It wasn’t merely the medium through which my parents made their way in the world: it provided the means to support their children, one of whom was now flipping the proverbial bird to the very hand that fed.

It might lend a degree of credibility to my role as my children’s primary educator if I could report that I dropped out of high school for reasons of virtue, perhaps to pursue a rigorous course of self-directed study in thermonuclear engineering or to dig wells in some impoverished sub-Saharan village. But the truth is, I left public school because I was bored to the point of anger. To the point of numbness. To the point of rebellion.
Fin and Rye drying foraged chokecherries. The boys know where to find wild mushrooms and berries, “and lord knows what else [they] are eating out there,” Hewitt writes on his blog. Photo: Penny Hewitt
Day after day I sat, compelled to repeat and recite, and little of it seemed to have any bearing beyond the vacuum of the classroom. Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell.

Peter Gray knows just how I felt. Gray, a Boston College psychology professor who wrote the 2013 book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, is unsparing in his criticism of compulsory education. “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,” he says. “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is. School deliberately removes the environmental conditions that foster self-directed learning and natural curiosity. It’s like locking a child in a closet.”

What kids need instead, Gray contends, is exploration and play without supervision. It is this that allows them to develop self-determination and confidence. If he’s right, current educational trends are not promising: in 2012, five states voted to increase the length of the school year by no less than 300 hours.

Of course, unschooling is not the only choice. Increasingly, families are turning to options like Waldorf, the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world. It was founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed that children learn best through creative play. In 1965, there were nine Waldorf schools in the U.S.; today there are 123.

Sending our children to a Waldorf school was never an option for us, if for no other reason than tuition, which can run as high as $30,000 a year. But when Fin turned five, the age at which we deemed it necessary to introduce some structure to his days, Penny and I sought to integrate aspects of the Waldorf curriculum into his learning. We purchased reams of thick craft paper, along with pastel crayons and watercolor paints. Penny arranged a small “schooling” station at our kitchen table, under the assumption that our firstborn would sit contentedly, expressing his innate creativity even as he learned the rote information necessary to navigate the modern world.
The Hewitt family (plus goat). They’ve lived and worked on their Vermont farm for over two decades. Photo: Penny Hewitt;
It was, to put it mildly, a flawed assumption. Fin chafed at every second of his perceived captivity. Crayons were broken and launched at innocent walls. Pages of extremely expensive paper were torn to flaky bits. Bitter tears were shed, even a few by our son. It was an unmitigated disaster.

It was also a watershed moment for our family. Because as soon as we liberated ourselves from a concept of what our son’s education should look like, we were able to observe how he learned best. And what we saw was that the moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand: an excavator that not only rotated, but also featured an extendable boom; a popgun fashioned from copper pipe, shaved corks, and a whittled-down dowel; even a sawmill with a rotating wooden “blade.”

In other words, the moment we quit trying to teach our son anything was the moment he started really learning.

In my early twenties, having passed my General Educational Development test and endured two semesters in Vermont’s state college system, I lived for a time in a $75-per-month bungalow just outside the bucolic Vermont village of Warren. This was at the apex of my immersion into bicycle racing and backcountry skiing, and I worked infrequently in a bike and ski shop, subsisting on the time-honored action-sports diet of boxed noodles, canned tuna, and expired Clif Bars liberated from the shop’s dumpster.

The bungalow was attached to a rambling, ranchlike structure that looked out over the valley; it was one of those seventies-era, quasi-communal homesteads that carried the lingering scent of sandalwood incense and the fetid body odor unique to heavy tofu consumption. A sign by the door read Resurrection City. Resurrection from what? I had no idea, and no one seemed to know.
During my yearlong tenure at Camp RC, as it was affectionately known, the main house was occupied by a single thirtysomething fellow named Donald who homeschooled his two young sons, Crescent and Orion. Or maybe he unschooled them. I do have a vague recollection of them sitting at a table, studying… well, something. But, for the most part, the boys ran wild, exploring the surrounding woods. On weekends, Donald packed up his orange VW van and drove with Crescent and Orion to bike races and music festivals, where they hawked vegetarian burritos. By the ages of six and eight, the boys were prepping orders and making change.

I was blown away. And jealous. This was the childhood I wished I’d had, equal measures freedom, responsibility, and respect, with none of the rote soul-crushing memorization that had soured me on school. Sure, Crescent and Orion could be a bit wild—I once found the front bumper of my truck kissing a spruce tree that stood between the driveway and the house—but they were precocious and self-aware, brimming with confidence and curiosity. They looked you in the eye and spoke in full sentences. They were constantly running and laughing and playing. I’m not sure how else to put it except to say that never before had I known kids who so fully embodied childhood.

When Penny, then my girlfriend, came to visit, she noticed it, too. “Those kids are amazing,” she said. “I didn’t even know there were kids like that.”

Fin and Rye almost always wake up before dawn. We do not have an alarm clock, but early rising is our habit, ingrained over the decade and a half we’ve run our small farm. We tend to chores as a family: Penny heads to the barn to milk cows, I move the rest of the herd to fresh pasture and slop the pigs, and the boys feed and water their dwarf goats, Flora, Lupine, and Midnight.
The “cafeteria”. The Hewitts run a diversified farm with gardens, an orchard and blueberry patch, and livestock—they also sell their produce. Photo: Penny Hewitt
By seven the chores are finished and we convene at the wide wooden table for breakfast—eggs, usually, and bacon from last year’s pigs. After breakfast, I repair to my desk to write and Penny heads to the fields or orchard. Fin and Rye generally follow their mother before disappearing into the woods. Sometimes they grab fishing poles, uncover a few worms, and head to the stream, returning with their pockets full of fish, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. Occasionally I join them, and these journeys are always marked by frequent stops, with one boy or the other dropping to his knees to examine some small finding, something I would have blithely, blindly stumbled over.

“Papa, look, wild onions.” And they’ll dig with their young fingers, loosing the little bulbs from the soft forest soil. Later, we’ll fry them in butter and eat them straight from the pan, still hot enough that we hold them on the tips of our tongues before swallowing.

Other times, they work on one of the shelters that they always seem to be constructing; their voices carry across the land as they negotiate materials and design.

“Fin, let’s put the door on this side.”

“Did you say ten and three-eighths or ten and five-eighths?”

“Rye, we need another pole on this end.”
These shelters are so prolific that occasionally I come across one I hadn’t even known existed, and I can see the evolution of the boys’ learning in the growing soundness of these humble structures. Winter’s first big snowfall no longer spells collapse; the boys have learned to slope the roof and to support the ridgepole at its center. They face the openings southward and build on a piece of well-drained ground. They use rot-resistant cedar for anything that will contact the soil.
The boys cleaning the garlic crop. The Hewitts all tend to their farm as a family. Photo: Penny Hewitt
Fin and Rye are proficient with most of the hand and power tools that form the backbone of any working farm. By the time they were eight, both of them could operate the tractor and, in a pinch, drive the truck with a load of logs. They split firewood alongside us, swinging their mauls with remarkable accuracy. They are both licensed hunters and own .22 rifles and 20-gauge shotguns. They wear belt knives almost everywhere, oblivious to the stares of the adults around them, some concerned, some perplexed, and some, it often seems to me, nostalgic.

Our sons are not entirely self-taught; we understand the limits of the young mind and its still-developing capacity for judgment. None of these responsibilities were granted at an arbitrary, age-based marker, but rather as the natural outgrowth of their evolving skills and maturity. We have noticed, however, that the more responsibility we give our sons, the more they assume. The more we trust them, the more trustworthy they become. This may sound patronizingly obvious, yet I cannot help but notice the starring role that institutionalized education—with its inherent risk aversion—plays in expunging these qualities.

Our days do have structure: chores morning and evening, gardens to be turned and planted, berries to be picked and sold, all these things and so many more repeating in overlapping cycles. But even within these routines, Fin and Rye determine how their days will be spent. Often they disappear for hours at a time, their only deadline being whichever meal comes next. On their backs, they wear wooden pack baskets that they wove under the tutelage of a friend who also unschools her children. When they return, the baskets are heavy with the small treasures of their world and their heads are full of the small stories of their wandering: the moose tracks they saw, the grouse they flushed, the forked maple they sat beneath to eat snacks. “The bark felt thick,” Fin tells me. “It’s going to be a hard winter.”

Which brings us to the inevitable issue of what will become of my boys. Of course, I cannot answer in full, because their childhoods are still unfolding.

But not infrequently I field questions from parents who seem skeptical that my sons will be exposed to particular fields of study or potential career paths. The assumption seems to be that by educating our children at home and letting them pursue their own interests, we are limiting their choices and perhaps even depriving them. The only honest answer is, Of course we are. But then, that’s true of every choice a parent makes: no matter what we choose for our children, we are by default not choosing something else.

I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so later than is expected. They can add and subtract and multiply and divide. I can report that they do indeed have friends, some who attend school and some who don’t, and their social skills are on par with their peers. In fact, Penny and I often hear from other adults that our sons seem better socialized than like-aged schoolchildren. Fin and Rye participate in a weekly gathering of homeschooled and unschooled kids, and Fin attends a weekly wilderness-skills program. In truth, few of their peers are as smitten with bushcraft as they are, and sometimes they wish for more friends who share their love of the wild. But even this is OK; the world is a place of wondrous diversity, and they must learn that theirs is not the only way.
What if they want to be doctors? They will be doctors. What if they want to be lawyers? They will be lawyers. Peter Gray, he of the belief that school is prison, has studied graduates of the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, where “students” as young as four enjoy complete autonomy to design their own course of study, even if that involves no studying at all, and found that they have no difficult gaining entry to elite colleges, nor in achieving high GPAs. A home-based education, even one as unstructured as my sons’, does not preclude acceptance into a university; in fact, many colleges have developed application processes geared specifically toward homeschooled students, and while there are no major studies of unschoolers exclusively, homeschoolers are significantly more likely to take college-level courses than the rest of us.

“I look back at unschooling as the best part of my life,” Chelsea Clark told me between classes at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where she was accepted on full scholarship after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the university’s undergraduate program. “It was a huge advantage, actually. I had the confidence of knowing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t burned out on classroom learning like most college kids.” Chelsea was unschooled throughout her high school years in the small town of Dorchester, South Carolina.

Still, perhaps the best answer I can give to the question of what price my children might pay is in the form of another question: What price do school-going children pay for their confinement? The physical toll is easy enough to quantify. Diabetes rates among school-age children are sky-high, and the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who qualify as obese has nearly tripled since 1980. And what do children do in school? Exactly. They sit.

Inactivity is also bad for the brain. A 2011 study by Georgia Health Sciences University found that cognitive function among kids improves with exercise. Their prefrontal cortex—the area associated with complex thinking, decision making, and social behavior—lights up. The kids in the study who exercised 40 minutes per day boosted their intelligence scores by an average of 3.8 points.

Yet the physical and cognitive implications of classroom learning have played minor roles in our decision to unschool Fin and Rye. It’s not that I don’t want them to be healthy and smart. Of course I do—I’m their father.

But, in truth, what I most want for my boys can’t be charted or graphed. It can’t be measured, at least not by common metrics. There is no standardized test that will tell me if it has been achieved, and there is no specific curriculum that will lead to its realization.

This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose. I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.

I want for them the freedom to be children. And no one can teach them how to do that.

Ben Hewitt’s new book is Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting Off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World. He blogs at benhewitt.net.

Artist Organisations International brings together over twenty representatives of organisations founded by artists whose work confronts today’s crises in politics, economy, education, immigration and ecology. Artist Organisations International explores a current shift from artists working in the form of temporary projects to building long-term organisational structures. What specific artistic value and political potential do such organisations have? How do they perform? What could be their concrete impact on various social-political agendas and possible internationalist collaborations?

Artist organisations are founded by artists

Artists Organisations International brings together organisations that have been initiated by artists and advocate a specific understanding of art within a social and political context by using the subversive and transformative potential of visual literacy, modes of re-contextualisation and performativity.

Artist organisations choose the form of the organisation

Artist organisations seek for continuity of cultural and political engagement that is not just based on personal interest and authorship. At the same time, the artist organisation also questions the form of the organisation itself: by emphasizing urgency, change and criticality, it is a living organism. Artist organisations translate engagement into infrastructure and open the possibility of outliving their creators.

Artist organisations seek for structural engagement

The last decades have seen an important change in our perception of art. The focus has shifted from artworks as ‘objects’ towards the concept of the ‘project’: a temporal intervention or engagement focussing on research and processes rather than on a final product. However the limitation of concrete artistic and political effects of temporary projects is implicit. The change from projects to organisations demands a more structural engagement, more durability and long-term vision. Artist organisations push the concept of self-governance to another level: both within and outside of the art world.

Artist organisations propose social/political agendas

In their work artist organisations bring forward a social/political agenda that connects the field of ethics with aesthetics. Rather than a medium merely ‘questioning’ and ‘confronting’ the world, the artist organisation situates itself in the field of daily political struggle. Rather than questioning the world, it makes a world.

Uma Nagendra, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, has just won the 2014 edition of the “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest. Sponsored byScience and HighWire Press, the contest asks grad students to “explain their Ph.D. research in the most jargon-free medium of all: dance.” (More criteria can be found over at the contest’s tips & tricks page.) According to Sciencemagazine, Nagendra likes to spend “a good deal of her [free] time hanging upside down from a trapeze doing circus aerials.” It’s a creative outlet for her. And it offers a good way, it turns out, to visualize the conclusions of her dissertation exploring “Plant-soil feedbacks after severe tornado damage.”

The “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest allows each contestant to submit a video with a short piece of descriptive text. Here is what Nagendra wrote:

Many of the patterns we see in forests around the world are caused by the relationships that plants have with organisms in the soil. Some very diverse forests can only support as many different tree species as they do because soil-borne diseases prevent any one species from taking over. But what happens when a tornado comes along? Do the plants and soil organisms maintain this diversity-promoting relationship?

My PhD research focuses on how several different species of tree seedlings in the southern Appalachian mountains interact with soil organisms—and how tornadoes might mix things up. I study many different species. As an example, we can look at white pine (Pinus strobus), and the many pathogens that attack the roots of its seedlings.

The dance begins in an undisturbed forest. Because trees live for so long in one place, a mature pine tree accumulates a unique group of fungi around its roots—including pathogens that cause diseases in tree seedlings (in this case, Pythium and Rhizoctonia). White pine seedlings that are very close to a mature tree are more likely to be attacked by these pathogens—causing stunted growth, or even death. The farther away a seedling is from a mature tree, the less likely it is to get infected. These distant seedlings are more likely to survive to maturity. A pattern emerges where the mature pine trees are spaced far apart—leaving room for seedlings of other species to grow, and creating a diverse forest.

In the middle of the dance, we witness the tornado—and how it changes the forest environment. The mature pine tree dies, and the forest floor is no longer shaded. The soil becomes hotter and drier. Without the living mature tree as a host, specialist pathogens are less active, and many die. Because of this, I am predicting that plant-soil relationships in recently tornado-damaged areas may be much weaker. In the last part of the dance, seedlings close to the (killed) mature tree are no longer at greater risk for disease; they grow and survive the same as their more distant siblings. The changing plant-soil relationships after disturbances might be one piece in the puzzle of how diverse ecosystems change over time.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. TEDxCalArts: Performance, Body and Presence

Brian Massumi is a Canadian social theorist. Massumi’s research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987. His publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali’s Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with Hexagram: Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. They co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale textile installations that facilitate emergent collectivities. She presented Stitching Time at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, will present Stitching Time – Traces at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013 and is preparing a work entitled The Knots of Time for the opening of the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming co-written manuscript (with Brian Massumi) is entitled Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP).

About TEDx, x = independently organized event In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)